Near the end of Ouellette’s new book — a personal journey exploring what shapes people’s sense of self — she pops a candy tablet of LSD and settles in for her first psychedelic experience. Ouellette had heard that once the drug wore off and the acid-induced wonderland slipped away, the “self” came barreling back.

“I had to experience this firsthand,” she writes. “After all, it was ‘...

The hottest thing in human evolution studies right now is DNA extracted from fossils of Neandertals and other long-gone populations. Pääbo, the dean of ancient-gene research, explains in his book how it all began when he bought a piece of calf liver at a supermarket in 1981.

In those days, DNA had been successfully pulled only from living animals. Pääbo modified the methods to...

With mighty bursts of rehydration, bacterial spores offer a new source of renewable energy.

Bacillus spores quickly shrivel in dry times and bloat with a blast of humidity. The transitions, which take about half a second, pack a powerful punch that biophysicist Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University realized could translate to usable energy. By smearing spores onto a flat piece of rubber...

Of the 51 tons of antibiotics consumed every day in the United States, about 80 percent goes into animal production (above). The widespread use of antibiotics in livestock may be contributing to growing resistance to the drugs by bacteria such as Salmonella (below). In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration enacted a voluntary program phasing out antibiotics used to make livestock...

Corals may whip up whirlpools to spin specks of food in and bits of waste out. Scientists had known that hairlike bristles, or cilia, on coral help sweep nutrients in, but the purpose of bristles lining the valleys between coral polyps had been more mysterious. Using video microscopy, MIT environmental engineer Vicente Fernandez and colleagues recorded two short clips...

Psychologists are as puzzled as parents over the explosive effect the Beatles are having on American teen-agers. There has not been enough serious study on mass adolescent reactions to explain the impact of these four mop-headed British youths…. The Beatles follow a line of glamorous figures who aroused passionate cries and deep swoons. Most prominent in the 1940’s was Frank Sinatra...

There’s a brilliant dreamlike sequence about halfway through the documentary Particle Fever, when theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed enters his building at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., looking troubled. Cartoon equations and figures swirl around his head. As he walks upstairs to his office and starts to work, the building’s windows fall away. Shortly thereafter,...

The best clock in the world has no hands, no pendulum, no face or digital display. It’s a jumble of lasers, wires and strontium atoms in Jun Ye’s lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo. He keeps it cooled to about three millionths of a degree above absolute zero.

The clock, described by Ye in the Feb. 6 Nature, is so precise that had it begun...

Sometime in the future: A patient leaves the hospital with a new pacemaker implanted next to her heart to steady its beat. Her older brother, who went through the same procedure a few years earlier, will soon need another major surgery to replace his pacemaker’s batteries. But she won’t. Her device can generate its own electricity indefinitely with sugar and oxygen harvested from her...

CHICAGO — The same gray triangles that peek above ocean waves to terrify beachgoers could prove a boon for climate scientists. By strapping sophisticated sensors to sharks’ otherwise ominous fins, researchers can now collect temperature and other environmental data from the far reaches of the Pacific.

Maintaining devices that monitor conditions in the ocean is expensive, says marine...